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Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Old is new: on literature and Plutarch

The home-work
should teach boys what is literature,
the school-work what is thought. A
beginning might be made with "Robinson Crusoe" and Byron's "Sennacherib," or some other short, intelligible,
and powerful poem; then "Ivanhoe"
and the "Armada"; then Plutarch's
"Coriolanus"and the "Horatius Codes,"
Plutarch's "Julius Caesar" and Gray's
"Ruin seize thee"; Plutarch's "Agis
and Cleomenes" and the "Battle of
Ivry"; then "Marmion"; then the "Allegro" and " Penseroso," or "Comus"; then (in the class in which those boys
leave who are intended for commercial
pursuits) Pope's "Iliad"; then part of
the "Paradise Lost;" then part of the "Fairy Queen"; then Chaucer's "Knight's
Tale" or Dante's "Inferno" (in English),
or the "In Memoriam," or some of the poems of Dryden, Pope, or Johnson... A play of Shakespeare might be read
during another term throughout almost
every class in the school. Shakespeare
and Plutarch's "Lives" are very devulgarizing books, and I should like every
boy who leaves a middle-class school for
business at the age of fifteen, suppose,
or sixteen, to have read three or four
plays of Shakespeare, three or four noble
poems, and three or four nobly-written
lives of noble Greeks and Romans. I
should therefore like to see Plutarch's
" Lives " in the hands of every English
schoolboy; or, if it were necessary to
make a selection, those biographies which
best illustrate one's "duty toward one's
country."

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